In Defense of Hamid Karzai

By

Bret Stephens

Updated Nov. 10, 2009 12:01 a.m. ET

In the matter of Hamid Karzai (this would be the feckless, warlord-backed, corruption-tainted and dubiously re-elected president of Afghanistan), it's wonderful to observe how he has single-handedly created a new designation in the American ideological lexicon: the neo-neocon.

Who are the neo-neocons? They're a bipartisan, single-issue group that has recently discovered the virtues—nay, the necessity—of clean, orderly, democratic governance.

On the left, they are the same folks who enthusiastically supported the Oslo Accords that brought about Yasser Arafat's violent and kleptocratic rule. They were no less enthusiastic about underwriting the enterprise with billions in foreign aid, even as evidence accumulated that the money was being put to every use except improving the life of Palestinians.

On the right, they are the people who used to extol the virtues of Marcos, Pinochet, Musharraf and every other Third World strongman who happened to be "our SOB." They're also fond of citing Edmund Burke, et al., about the hopelessness of planting democratic trees in sandy Muslim soils.

Now the two wings of this new movement are improbably joined in making the case that the realities of Mr. Karzai's compromised government hopelessly complicate our task in Afghanistan and fall far short of being something worth fighting for. What to do? On this key point, the neo-neocons aren't quite sure, except to strike a pose of serious reserve about the war, tending in the direction of exit.

But just how bad, really, is Hamid Karzai? Let's compare.

Is Mr. Karzai as bad as his immediate predecessor, Mullah Mohammed Omar, under whose medieval rule Afghanistan became not just a safe haven for al Qaeda, but a byword for Islamist barbarism? Is he as bad as what came before the Taliban: Four years of unrestrained civil war in which nearly all of Kabul was blasted to ruin?

Is Mr. Karzai as bad as the Soviet-backed governments of Mohammad Najibullah and Babrak Karmal, who applied the usual Communist methods of rounding up, torturing and killing tens of thousands of real, suspected or imaginary political opponents? Is he as bad as Mohammed Daoud Khan, who in 1973 overthrew the Afghan monarchy in favor of a repressive, but also incompetent, one-party system?

Or is Mr. Karzai a leader on a par with Zahir Shah, the last king of Afghanistan, who was politically weak and allegedly somewhat corrupt but essentially decent, civilized and well-meaning? Today, Zahir's rule is remembered as a golden age in Afghan history.

These historical precedents are worth recalling because they are the templates of the kind of governance Afghans can reasonably expect. Would they have done better under Mr. Karzai's main challenger in the last election, former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah? Maybe, but Dr. Abdullah is half-Tajik. And the brute reality of Afghanistan is that it would be even more difficult to govern under a non-Pashtun president, since Pashtuns are half the Afghan population and most of the trouble.

No wonder, then, that the announcement of Mr. Karzai's re-election was greeted in Kabul with "a collective sigh of relief," as the Washington Post reported last week. "I think people were fed up with this controversy over the election," the Post quoted a running mate of Dr. Abdullah. "I think it's a good thing that this is finished. Whether it's legal or not, we can stop discussing this matter. Now he's elected."

That's a usefully matter-of-fact rejoinder to all the hand-wringing in the West over whether Mr. Karzai has the requisite "legitimacy" to govern Afghanistan. It would be equally useful if some of Mr. Karzai's more acerbic Western critics could ask themselves why matters went abruptly south in Afghanistan after several years in which they had gone swimmingly well under Mr. Karzai, including a thriving economy, girls back in school, people having access to health care and so on. The answer has a lot less to do with Mr. Karzai's performance than with NATO's.

How's that? It is not Mr. Karzai's fault that NATO insisted for years that the Afghan National Army be no larger than a constabulary force, leaving it in no position to join the battle against a resurgent Taliban. It is not his fault that foreign aid organizations consistently botched the delivery. Much less is it his fault that the former government of Pakistan essentially ceded its frontier provinces to the Taliban, which promptly turned them into havens of militancy.

None of this means that Mr. Karzai is a saint or even much of a statesman. But neither is he a despot, a fanatic, a sybarite, or an uncouth bigot—qualities that typify the leadership of countries for which the U.S. has also expended blood and treasure in defense of lesser causes. Our failures in Afghanistan so far have mainly been our own, and they are ours to fix. To blame Mr. Karzai is to point the finger at the wrong culprit in the pursuit of disastrous, dishonorable defeat.

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